Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder

“Violation of biological command has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates though we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilisation’s earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened though we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realisable.”

In his two previous books, Robert Ardrey exploded a series of philosophical landmines. African Genesis (1961) fundamentally altered the understanding of man’s relationship to his evolutionary forebears. The Territorial Imperative (1966) so saturated the cultural imagination that its title is in everyday use. The third in this series, The Social Contract denies that men are created equal, but insists they deserve absolute equality of opportunity.

Since the publication of Rousseau’s Social Contract two centuries ago, men have wasted social resources, converted education into brain-washing, and ignored the primacy of natural law in pursuit of a goal of equality that is neither desirable nor possible. Discarding the myth, Ardrey combined his wealth of knowledge of animal ways with cutting edge biology to probe the perplexing problems of his time: the revolt of the young, the status struggle and the role of leadership, population control, urban overcrowding, violence in civilised life.